


Hallucinate

by Littlebutterfly



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Angst, Asylum, Crazy Louis, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Hallucinations, Hospital, Hospitalization, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, M/M, Mental Asylum, Mental Breakdown, Mental Disorder, Mental Health Issues, Mental Illness, Mental Instability, Mental Institutions, Schizophrenia, Triggers, Violence, psychiatric hospital
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-11
Updated: 2017-08-14
Packaged: 2018-11-12 20:27:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,068
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11169462
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Littlebutterfly/pseuds/Littlebutterfly
Summary: Louis was the newest resident of the England's worst insane asylum.On his good days he was smiley, and bright and bubbly. He giggled a lot and chatted aimlessly (to people that didn't exist). But on his bad days, he'd be left in fits on the floor, rocking and hitting himself to make the voices go away.Louis has schizophrenia.And maybe Harry's his refuge.





	1. Chapter 1

Everyone’s heard the horror stories of insane asylums.  
Everyone’s seen the television shows, seen the horror movies, read the stories, told the ghost stories over a camp fire. The stories of people with horrifying psychotic disorders, people that blended up puppies and murdered school girls…  
Everyone has an idea in their mind when they hear the word ‘mental asylum’, when they hear the word ‘psychotic’. And it’s never good.  
Psychiatric hospitals are known to be the home to all that was evil in the world. They’re known to house psychotic murders, and sociopaths… and… well…  
And then there was Louis. 

 

Louis was eighteen. And Louis was not a serial killer.  
Louis didn’t microwave baby kittens or torture people for the fun of it.  
But Louis was part of the group. Louis was a registered psychotic.  
Louis was a sweet boy. On his good days he was smiley, and bright and bubbly. He giggled a lot and chatted aimlessly.  
And that was exactly the problem. Louis ‘chatted aimlessly’ to people that weren’t there.  
Louis has schizophrenia. 

 

It started when he was three years old, and it started off as little sparks that could be easily played off as an overly creative child. Because all three year olds have imaginary friends, all three year olds chat to themselves and make up incredible stories about make believe creatures, and Louis was no exception. A ‘wild imagination’ his teachers would say.  
But wild imaginations didn’t lead to screams and panic attacks and smacking your own head so hard that you suffered concussions, just so you could make the screaming voices leave you alone for five minutes.

Louis’ case was different.  
Because as Louis grew, so did Louis’ little friends. And they weren’t so little or imaginary anymore. Not to him.  
Louis saw things. Louis heard things that were real to him. That were as real as anyone else’s voice. And they often that told him to do bad things to people, to himself.  
The struggle was that Louis was a good boy. Louis was a kind and sweet boy and he didn’t want to hurt people. But the more the voices grew and yelled, the more distant Louis became.  
It only took another couple of years for his little imaginary friends and voices to take over, for him to find it psychologically impossible to decipher the real from the false, and for society to exclude him entirely.  
He wasn’t allowed to go to kindergarten with the other children, he wasn’t allowed to join footy teams or go to the park. He was considered a danger to others and himself, despite the boy having never even hurt a fly. 

But with no one to play with, with no other human connection except for his shit-excuse-for-parents, Louis had no option but to play with his fluffy white kitten that no one else could see.  
He had no option but to talk to the old man that would stand in the corner of his bedroom. To give into the shadow figures that would come to his room every night and whisper horrible things to him.  
And when Louis’ utters to himself began to take over his life, when the figures and the voices and the shadow men that would leave Louis in fits of screams and panic began to be all he was, when it began to take over and control him, Louis was thrown away like old rubbish.

 

His parents hadn’t cared. They didn’t try to help him; they didn’t find support.  
They’d never been the affectionate type, and perhaps that’s what started the issues in the first place, but the day they were legally allowed to, they threw Louis into the biggest, most crowded, most unregulated, cheapest psychiatric hospital they could get their hands on, and they threw away the key.  
That place, was Doncaster Hospital For The Insane.  
Doncaster Psych hospital was known for it’s reputation… or, perhaps lack thereof was more the proper terminology for it.  
It was big, and it was old, and it was run by strict staff who had been through way too much shit in their lifetime.  
It was home to every Tom, Dick and Harry who couldn’t afford real treatment, who couldn’t get real help. Everyone from the criminally insane, to people with bi-polar, to people simply suffering through bouts of depression… It was all here, and it was all a big mess, which now included Louis within it’s walls.  
Instead of patients getting help, it simply ended up as an institution for people to be locked up and forgotten about.  
And that’s what Louis was. He was locked up to be forgotten about.  
No one cared for him anymore, no one wanted him.  
That was one thing that he could establish as reality. 

 

 

X / X / X 

 

Harry Styles was a sweet boy. He was a sweet boy from a decent family that somehow ended up getting wrapped up into the wrong crowd of people.  
He’d made friends at school, who had managed to convince him to sneak out late, party hard, and get up to regular teenage mischief. Tagging walls late at night, drunken antics around the town, smoking God knows what in darkened ally ways….  
It was harmless all-in-all, but it was illegal, and he was on his third police offence.  
And you know how the old saying goes. Three strikes and you’re out.  
Out meant a month of registered community service.  
Out meant a month of registered community service at Doncaster Hospital For The Insane. 

Harry had heard the stories of the place- everyone around the city had. The hospital was an urban legend in itself.  
‘I heard that there’s ghosts there’  
‘One of the doctors there got beheaded by a patient!’  
‘Once you go in, you never come out’  
It was all stupid, childish gossip, and Harry knew better than to believe in it. But as he approached the rusted gates of the hospital and entered the large building, he couldn’t help but feel a shiver run down his spine.

 

“Harry Styles, I presume?”  
A woman in her fifty’s looked up from the secured reception counter, with a double-glass barrier blocking her from Harry. The glass was dinted and scratched, and it made Harry wonder what sort of things had to happen to cause something like that.  
Maybe he was better off not knowing.  
The boy nodded an agreement, “That’s me, yes.”  
She hummed, and her eyes scanned over his body programmatically before she stood, taking a lanyard of keys from around her neck and walking to the door that protected her from the outside world, opening it and stepping out.  
“Follow me.”

“The upper board have decided to start a program for our lower security patients that they believe would benefit with regular human interaction,” she spoke simply as she lead the way down the corridor, passing room after room of patients. She spoke as if these patients were no more than experiments, and it made Harry’s skin crawl a bit.  
She stopped abruptly when she reached her desired room, and stopped out the front of it, taking a key and unlocking the door.  
“You’ve been paired with Louis Tomlinson.”


	2. Chapter 2

Harry wasn’t one for stereotypes by any means. He didn’t like expecting the expected, or judging something (or someone) before he understood it better…

Judging and stereotypes were his whole life. From the day that he came out as gay to his friends, to his family, to his work colleagues… it had all been stereotypes and expectations from there on out… And Harry vouched to never be _‘that’_ person. It wasn’t fair to anyone.

And Harry was fairly good at that, usually. He never judged before asking questions, he was a fairly un-opinionated person… a ‘love everyone’ sort of guy. He didn’t like believing what the media and the movies and the books told him…

But even Harry found it hard to look at the shitty excuse for a room in front of him and think of anything other than every horror movie ever made.

  
The room that he saw in front him made every location from Ghost Adventures, every shitty horror movie, and everything in between, look like a luxury hotel.   
The room in front of him was dark. It was cold, and the smell inside of it was similar to that of a musky ally way.   
It was nothing but a stone floor and cold, white brick walls. A steel bed frame was in the corner, with rubber coverings on the edges, and a small desk holding nothing but old bits of charcoal sat sadly against one of the crappily painted walls.  
The room looked like a prison cell. An old, horrible prison cell that surely wouldn’t be legal anymore… And yet, here they were.   
How could anyone get better when this was where they were asked to live their lives out?

Harry felt his stomach churn as he cast his eyes towards the lone figure in the room…. The skinny frame of a small boy, seemingly around his age- but with a posture that made him look ten times older, and a look of pure fear that made him look like an infant.

 

The boys pale, frigid body was tucked in on itself as he rocked slowly, whispering quietly to himself in words that Harry wasn’t so sure that he _wanted_ to hear, even if they were legible.

 

“This... Is he… How do I…What am I meant…” Harry could barely remember how to speak himself.   
He knew that taking this task on wasn’t exactly meant to be a walk in the park, but he didn’t expect to be dealing with a literal scene straight out of _Grave Encounters._

The nurse shrugged, smacking her thin lips together as she picked at a nail cuticle, “he’s not dangerous. Do with him what you will… No one else can,” she barely looked up at Harry as she shrugged.  
A blank, expressionless answer that held less emotion towards the boy than she would likely feel towards an inanimate object. Because that’s all they saw Louis as now… he was a burden. He was a lost cause, an absolute raging lunatic, and no one in the fucking world could care less for him.

She was numb to the entire thing…. Completely okay with the fact that a teenage boy was sitting in the corner of a rotting room, crying to himself. And that admittedly scared Harry a bit.   
It scared him that while one human was seemingly terrified beyond belief of something that didn’t even exist outside of his own reality, another could watch on without giving a rat’s arse.   
“He’s all yours,” the woman stated simply, and turned to leave without another word.   
And that was that.

 

 

Harry inhaled a deep breath, and took a moment to look over Louis. To try and figure out what to expect… What to say. What to do.  
He was told that Louis wasn’t dangerous. Not to other people, at least.

So he pushed forward with faked confidence.   
“Hello, you must be Louis….”  


 

 

 

Louis’ eyes shot up when he heard someone’s voice- as if he hadn’t heard the entire conversation from his open doorway that was happening only seconds ago.

His dull, sunken eyes looking up in panic as they landed on Harry, mimicking the look of a panicked deer caught in the headlights of a car.

How had it ended up like this?

 

Louis was a sweet boy. He was smiley and cheeky and sassy and liked to smile and have fun. He was loud and obnoxious and everyone’s friend. He was the life of the party; he was the literal personification of sunshine.

Until he wasn’t.

  
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt genuine, unadulterated happiness.

Ever since he’d been dumped at Doncaster Asylum for the Insane all those years ago, he’d simply seemed to deteriorate, rather than get better.   
Ever since the day when Louis was a little boy, crying about _‘the figures. The figures, mummy.’_

And it was all downhill from there.

While mindless board games and silly hobbies and meaningless chitchat seemed to keep the other patients in the asylum amused and out of trouble for the most part, Louis was going through something so much more painful… deeper than he could comprehend. Deeper than stupid games and conversations could pull him from.

Now, his mind was full of ‘figures’.

Some were nice.

His cat. He liked his cat.   
But most….  Most of them weren’t so nice. The shadow man, the screaming woman…   
Most of them screamed bloody murder at him.

They surrounded every corner, they pierced through his ears and into his mind and polluted his head with bad thoughts.

Every moment of his life was spent in uncertainty, in fear, in terror.  
His head was full of voices that didn’t belong to him, his vision was clouded with dark shadow figures and monsters from hell that made every moment a living nightmare. 

And so, it was no surprise that when Louis saw the curly haired boy standing at the doorway, he was completely terrified.   
How could you not be, when there was no distinct line between your realities and your imagination?

“Hey, my name’s Harry….”

“Out. Get out. Get _out!”_ Louis’ voice was harsh and raw, like he never spoke unless it was to scream. His eyes were laced with pure terror as he spoke the first words that were legible… but the impact behind them held nothing.

Louis had never heard of _Harry_ before. He’d heard of the Shadow Man, he’d heard of Constance- the woman who would stand in the left corner of his room and shriek at him.   
He’d heard of the thousands, upon thousands of shrieking voices inside of his mind that would plague him with negative words, with whispers of ‘ _you’re a screw up’_ and ‘ _you’ll never escape, Louis’._

But on his bad days, on the days when the staff mistreated him, when people yelled at him from the hallways… it wasn’t uncommon for new, more terrifying visions to start appearing. For them to look so, so fucking real.

For them to mimic the appearance of a sweet looking boy…   
But they’d all end up the same way. Attacking him from the inside out, screwing with his mind and causing him to get pushed under in fits of terrifying panic.

 

Louis hadn’t conjured up this particular figure before, but he was absolutely positive that this person wasn’t real. He couldn’t be.   
No one in their right minds would possibly want to waste their days locked away with Louis.

There was always the off chance that Harry could be a nice figure, a nice figment that his imagination conjured up.   
But that wasn’t very likely- especially as of recent.   
Everyone was only here to hurt him… And Louis didn’t want to take that chance again.

“Out. Please… Please get _out.”_

Louis sounded genuinely terrified rather than actually ordering Harry to leave, and it broke the curly haired boys heart to see someone so genuinely petrified. So petrified of _him._

He wasn’t sure what to do, he wasn’t sure how to react… What else was there to do?   
“Louis… I..”

 

Now Louis knew it was a figure. _It_ knew his name. It spoke to him like he was a person, rather than a test subject… an inanimate object without feeling.   
No real person ever spoke to him like he mattered.   
His mind liked to do that. Liked to conjure up images of things, pretending to care about him… But then would wreck him entirely only minutes later.

_Ha! Look at you._

_He’s going to get you…_

_You think this morning was bad? Ha! You just wait.  
It get’s worse._

_He’s one of us._

_One of us._

_One of us._

_One of us._

Louis’ knuckles flew to his head, his knuckles slamming into his temples in an attempt to silence the ear-ringing voices.   
It didn’t work, it never worked… But it didn’t stop him from trying. It didn’t stop him from turning his body black and blue every single day.

 

_That’s right, Louis._

_Try and hit yourself again._

_Do it harder, then we’ll go away._

 

“Stop it!”

 

 

The sight was an absolute mad house, it was pure chaos and both boys felt numb for completely different reasons.

Louis didn’t know how to feel.  
And Harry was feeling all too much… he didn’t know how the hell to help him.   
Harry watched on in minor horror as Louis screamed at him, to himself… smacking his head in the process.

Jesus Christ… The three-hour course that Harry had done in order to be accepted into this volunteer role explained none of this.

But Harry was intuitive… He’d seen his older sister suffer with poor mental health when she was a teenager. It was one of the reasons he’d been so invested in wanting to do this now. He’d sat there and cuddled her until she stopped crying, he’d pet back her hair and remind her that the shitty thoughts that she was having weren’t her own, and would help her with warm hugs and sweet biscuits and watching re-runs of their favourite childhood movies together.

Somehow, Harry didn’t think this would work with Louis…   
But throwing the towel in and giving up wasn’t even a thought on his mind.   
Louis needed help. He needed someone to love him and care for him and help him get away the negativity… And God Damn, Harry was going to make sure he was that person.

Because it was clear as day that nobody else would.

 

He pulled himself from his memory, and back into the present, where Louis was screaming and crying and begging for Harry to leave, and punching himself, and god damn, it was fucking heart breaking.

 

“Louis… I’m not going to hurt you.”  
Harry’s voice never raised higher than a soft whisper, it was never rough or annoyed or harsh, but the more that Louis sobbed and thrashed around, the more that Harry grew desperate.   
Louis was bleeding now, he’d quite literally punched his head so hard that trickles of blood were falling down his hair line…. And protests or not, Harry couldn’t sit back and watch Louis destroy himself.

 

“Louis… Let me help you.”  
And that’s when the punches moved from Louis’ own body to lash out at Harry.   
Louis’ fist collided right to Harry’s face.


End file.
